AI visibility audit for local businesses: what we check and why.
Twelve checks, each with a reason. Nothing on this list is a score, a grade or a promise. Each one is a question about your site that has a yes, a no, or a could not tell.
What the results mean before you read them.
Pass
The check ran against your live site and the condition held. A pass is evidence about that page on that day. It is not evidence that an assistant names you; that is a separate measurement with a separate instrument.
Fail
The check ran and the condition did not hold. Every fail on this list has a specific repair, and the repair is named in the result. A fail is the most useful outcome of the audit because it is the one that changes what you do next.
Could not measure
The check could not reach a verdict, usually because the page could not be fetched or timed out. This is reported as itself and never folded into a fail, because a broken instrument reporting zero is worse than one reporting unmeasured. If most checks land here, the first fix is reachability.
Twelve questions, grouped by what they protect.
| Check | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Page states who you are and what you sell in plain text | An assistant reads text. If the answer to what do you do lives in a hero image or a tagline graphic, it reads nothing. |
| Business name, address and phone are machine-readable | Local answers hinge on where you are. A phone number in an image or a map embed is invisible. |
| Organization schema present and valid | Structured data removes doubt about which entity the page describes when several businesses share a name. |
| Service or Product schema describes what you sell | Same reason, applied to the thing a customer is actually asking for. |
| Headings describe the content beneath them | Retrieval systems use headings to find the passage that answers the question. A heading that says Welcome answers nothing. |
| Answers appear as text, not only inside images | Menus, price lists and service areas published as images are common and unreadable. |
| Canonical URL declared | Without it, the same page at four addresses splits whatever trust it has earned four ways. |
| robots.txt permits AI retrieval crawlers | The most common single cause of absence. A rule written to stop scrapers often stops the answer engine too. |
| Sitemap reachable and current | A positive list of what you want fetched. Stale entries send crawlers to pages that no longer exist. |
| Page reachable without running JavaScript | The retrieval client does not run your app. If the served HTML is an empty shell, the page is empty to it. |
| Titles and descriptions unique per page | Duplicate titles make every page look like the same page, so none of them is the best answer for anything. |
| Contact route reachable in one step | When an assistant does name you, the customer still has to reach you. A contact path buried three clicks deep leaks the lead. |
And why.
- Whether ChatGPT names you. That is answer presence, and it is sampled on a schedule with a stated denominator rather than checked once. The instrument for it is Citability; the audit here covers what you can fix on your own site before that measurement means anything.
- A visibility score out of 100. Twelve checks with three possible verdicts do not become a percentage without hiding the could-not-measure column, and hiding that column is how a broken site gets reported as a healthy one.
- Review counts and star ratings. They matter for the map pack and they are not something a website audit can repair.
The audit is free because the diagnosis is the cheap part. What you do with a fail is described on the services page, and the first conversation about it happens after the results, not before.
The other guides in this set.
- Local SEO vs GEO vs AEO for local businesses Three acronyms, one plain comparison table, and which one to fund first.
- GEO for local businesses: does yours need it? Three questions that decide it, what the work actually is, and how to prove it worked.
- What sources ChatGPT uses to recommend local businesses What is observable about its retrieval, and what is only claimed.
- How to choose an AI SEO or GEO agency for a local business Nine questions to ask, and the answers that should end the call.
- How to track leads from ChatGPT and AI search without guessing What the referrer can prove, what it cannot, and what to record instead.
Get the twelve checks run on your site.
A person runs them and emails the audit within 2 business days. Each check reports as pass, fail or could not measure, with the repair named next to every fail.